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- Herausgeber: Icon Books
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018
200 years on from the first publication of Frankenstein, John Sutherland delves into the deepest, darkest corners of Mary Shelley's gothic masterpiece to see what strange and terrifying secrets lie within. Is Victor Frankenstein a member of the Illuminati? Was Mary Shelley really inspired by spaghetti? Whoever heard of a vegan monster? Exploring the lesser-known byways of both the original tale and its myriad film and pop culture spinoffs, from the bolts on Boris Karloff's neck to the role of Igor in Young Frankenstein, Frankenstein's Brain is a fascinating journey behind the scenes of this seminal work of literature and imagination. Includes a unique digest by the Guardian's John Crace.
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Contents
Preface
Being puzzled by great works of literature is, I’ve always believed, a healthy response. Solving conundrums, as best they can be solved, makes reading pleasurable (a reward which is not always high on the agenda in the universities I have worked in).
I have, over the years, written several books of this enjoyably querulous kind. Of this latest I will say that Frankenstein is brain-rackingly puzzling. I have done my best to think my way through the narrative obstacles Mary Shelley throws up – sometimes, surely, to tease the reader. But being teased too can be enjoyable.
Choice of text
There are several usable texts of Frankenstein, ranging from facsimiles of the manuscript copy-text (with Percy Shelley’s editorial revision), to the first three-volume edition (with Percy Shelley as midwife) published in 1818, to the 1823 theatre tie-in text (with William Godwin as midwife),* to the 1831 Standard Novel edition (with Mary Shelley, at last, delivering her own book in her own person, with an invaluable explanatory preface), to an eclectic assortment of modern editions.
The 1831 text, the last corrected in Mary Shelley’s lifetime (and with no interfering hands), is a tempting choice. But much had happened in her life – almost all of it catastrophic – since 1816 when Mary Godwin awoke with her primal dream-version of the story. The vibrant ‘young girl’ (as she called herself, looking back in 1831) was now a depressed widow and hard-pressed single mother. A submissive religiosity and fatalism in 1831 runs against the grain of the original free-thinking creation of 1818. A sharp edge has been blunted.†
Used in what follows is the 1818 text, it being, of the printed versions, closest to what was fresh in Mary Godwin’s mind in summer 1816, by Lake Geneva. I am an admirer of Gutenberg.org which has made a huge library of 19th-century fiction freely available. I have used the 1818 Gutenberg text (reproduced faithfully from the 1818 three-volume edition). Quotations can be found in seconds by the Gutenberg text’s word search facility.
Would that some sorcery could call up the dream which Mary tells us was the blueprint for the novel. Or that the script she used when reading out her (then) hour-long tale to the company at Villa Diodati had survived. Or that there were some Boswell record of the conversations she and her husband had about how to turn her primal ‘idea’ into something publishable. Or what Byron’s and his doctor friend John Polidori’s suggestions were after they heard her narration.
Whatever these regrets, the reader should bear in mind that the novel began as a vocal performance – recitative – in Villa Diodati to a supremely gifted group of literary people. Some of that survives in every version of Frankenstein, if only as the distant echo of a young girl’s voice.
In the above paragraphs I have referred to her as both Mary Godwin and Mary Shelley. She was Miss Godwin when, aged eighteen, she first conceived Frankenstein and Mrs Shelley when the 1818 edition came out, having married Percy (by whom she had had two illegitimate children) on 30 December 1816. She was the widowed Mrs Percy Shelley when the 1823 and 1831 editions came out. All that she had then of her drowned husband was his heart, in a silk pouch, pressed next to hers.‡ And memories.§
Recent criticism and biography mark a significant feminist strand in her makeup with the name ‘Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin’ or ‘Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’, according to date. To unclutter this short book I use ‘Mary’ where it seems right. Anne K. Mellor, a critic I am indebted to, warns of the possible condescension in a male commentator’s using women’s forenames. I have tried to balance that by plentiful use of ‘Victor’ and ‘Percy’. Somehow I can’t bring myself to call Byron ‘George’.
And what to call the humanoid at the centre of the story? ‘He’ (although his later behaviour is that of an ‘It’) I call ‘Creature’ other than on occasions when he becomes wholly a ‘Monster’. The novel isn’t consistent.¶
The opening section of this book will look in more detail at the background to and composition of the novel, briefly touched on above, and the life of Mary Shelley.
In the central section beginning on page 33 the entries follow, in rough sequence, the chain of narrative: from the retrospect opening in the Arctic, looping back to Victor Frankenstein’s family upbringing in Geneva, his going to university in Ingolstadt, his discoveries and fateful experiment; the mysteries surrounding the creation of the Creature; the mistreatment which makes the Creature monstrous; his crimes and vengeance against his maker and society; Frankenstein’s pursuit of the thing he has made to the ends of the earth; and finally their deaths, a kind of Liebestod, in the icy wasteland and waters of the North Pole. (A summary of the narrative can be found on page 51.)
After this there ensues a series of ‘afterthoughts’ on such subjects as Frankenstein in film and popular culture, Percy’s likely contribution, and what Mary earned from the book – plus, as an appendix, a retelling of Frankenstein by John Crace, in his own inimitable ‘digest’ style.
Because I anticipate that this is a book which will be dipped into I occasionally quote more than once relevant passages which any beginning-to-end reader is advised to skip.
* Produced after Godwin and his daughter saw Richard Brinsley Peake’s long-running dramatic adaptation, entitled Presumption, in London in July 1823. The theatrical production did much to popularise the novel after the three-volume initial edition failed even to sell out its 500 copies.
† Marilyn Butler’s 1998 Oxford World’s Classics edition usefully lists the changes between 1818 and 1831.
‡ See page 127.
§ A brief biography of Mary Shelley can be found on page 14.
¶ See the entry on what to call him, if anything other than a row of dashes, below, page 83.
I. BACKGROUND AND COMPOSITION
Mary Shelley: A Brief Life
Mary Godwin was born in north London in 1797, daughter of William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft. He was the author of An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793); she was the author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). Mary never knew her mother, who died of puerperal fever a week after her daughter’s birth. Natal trauma scenarios haunted Mary through life and are central to Frankenstein.
Mary grew up with a half-sister, Fanny, the illegitimate daughter of her mother. William Godwin then remarried and brought another illegitimate stepsister, Claire Clairmont, into the family. Whatever their rights, there was a plurality of women at 29 The Polygon, Somers Town.
It was an educational advantage for Mary that the family’s penury meant most of her learning happened there. Books and radical ideas were as everyday items as breakfast – and more plentiful. Godwin never made money from his writings. As his only legitimate daughter, Mary was her father’s favourite (but not that of her hated stepmother). William took unusual pains to cultivate Mary’s mind.
Among a range of other subjects, he had her tutored in Latin and Greek. Orthodox educational opinion of the time would have likened it to teaching dogs trigonometry. In her 1831 preface to Frankenstein, Mary recalls ‘writing stories’ from her earliest years. Mary was a published author (with a short poem) at the age of twelve, and she was (her father recorded) as pretty as she was intellectually precocious.
Prominent thinkers and leaders of the Romantic movement made it a point to visit William Godwin. The most important date in Mary’s young life was 11 November 1812, when she met Percy Bysshe Shelley and his wife Harriet, who were making a de rigueur visit. Shelley was a financial benefactor to the ever hard-up philosopher. Over the next two years he and Mary fell in love. She was barely sixteen, he was in his early twenties.
What did she look like in early life? Trelawny tells us that:
The most striking feature in her face was her calm grey eyes; she was rather under the English standard of woman’s height, very fair and light-haired, witty, social, and animated in the society of friends, though mournful in solitude.
The couple duly eloped, without Godwin’s permission, in July 1814 and left for Europe – currently in its pre-Waterloo lull. Shelley’s pregnant wife and child were not wanted on the trip. (Shelley was no novice at this kind of escapade: Harriet Westbrook had only been sixteen when he had eloped with her to Scotland.) The product of this free-love honeymoon, the poem ‘Mont Blanc’ – and connection with Mary – marks a palpable growth in Shelley’s poetry. But they ran out of money and returned, to public obloquy, in September, by which time Mary was pregnant.
The child (born in February 1815) died soon after birth. Shelley had, for love, lost not merely public respect but his private wealth. However, things looked up with a handsome bequest from his grandfather and the couple retired to a comfortable house in Windsor (lyricised in Mary’s later novel, The Last Man). Their second child, William, was born in 1816 – still some months before his parents married. Their marriage was not a happy event – only being made possible by virtue of the heavily pregnant Harriet drowning herself in the Serpentine in Hyde Park. It was a month before her decomposed body was discovered, allowing Percy and Mary to legitimise their union. The Shelleys then took flight again.
There ensued the creative cauldron at Villa Diodati – the ‘league of incest’, as moralists of the time called it (because of Byron’s earlier rumoured affair with his half-sister). Unlike her husband, who kept urging her towards rational adultery, Mary was a believer in neither free love nor Byronic recklessness. There were good reasons not to be. On the way to Switzerland they were accompanied by Mary’s stepsister Claire Clairmont, pregnant and half-abandoned by Byron. Mary was still nursing her four-month-old son.
Alongside Lake Geneva, during this ‘wet ungenial summer’, the company of writers enlivened their confinement in the villa with ghost stories. Mary, momentously, contributed Frankenstein as part of the fun.
One says fun, but there was an overhanging sense of gloom – apocalyptic weather, public obloquy, shame. The creative mood in which Frankenstein was created had dark, sometimes eerie undercurrents. As Brian Aldiss puts it:
Algolagnia* was certainly not absent from Mary’s make-up. She wrote Frankenstein with her baby son William by her side; yet she makes the monster’s first victim a little boy called William, Victor’s younger brother. ‘I grasped his throat to silence him and in a moment he lay dead at my feet. I gazed at my victim, and my heart swelled with exultation and hellish triumph.’ … Her little William (‘Willmouse’) died in the summer of 1819.
Over the next few years, the Shelleys were largely nomads in Italy. Ostensibly, the Mediterranean climate was kind to Percy’s lungs. Italy was, however, less kind to little Clara Shelley’s bowels, and the poor child died in infancy of dysentery.
Mary was again pregnant while watching her daughter die and sank into profound depression. Novels were, amidst all this domestic catastrophe (Percy, under the banner of free love, was never a faithful husband), taking form in her mind and in her notebooks; they would include the Italy-set Valperga (published in 1823) and the remarkable study of father–daughter incest Mathilda, written 1819–20 but not published until 1959. It has raised suspicion about the childhood relationship of Mary and her father William.
Mary’s fourth child, Percy, would, mercifully, survive. His father did not. Percy Bysshe Shelley was drowned in a squall, sailing in the Gulf of Spezia. The young widow devoted the remainder of her life to the two Percys (her son William had also died, of malaria, in 1819). She installed herself as the custodian of her husband’s literary legacy and – with financial help from Percy’s family, long estranged but now partly reconciled – her son’s education.
Percy junior was destined to be the inheritor of a title and a fortune. The family insisted, using the lever of a £250 p.a. allowance, on Mary and her son returning to England, where she was unhappy and chronically lonely and he was turned into exactly the kind of Englishman his father detested. Nor were Mary’s relations with her father always good, although he did get the second edition of Frankenstein published for her.
Mary’s financial situation eased when young Percy succeeded to the family title in 1844. She was not, however, to enjoy many happy years, dying of a brain tumour when still in her early fifties. Her radiant beauty had been wiped out by smallpox some while before. Everything, even death and decay, happened to Mary Shelley too young. She published novels in the 1820s and 1830s – most of them with the ‘Prince of Puffers’, Henry Colburn, for cash down and not much of it. Fiction was no longer a parlour game for her.
The most interesting of Mary Shelley’s later novels is The Last Man. The action is set in the last years of the 21st century. England has become a republic. The abdicated royal family figure centrally around the person of the anchorite philosopher-narrator Lionel Verney. Shelley and Byron appear under thinnest disguise.
The third volume (the climax is tediously late in coming) features a worldwide plague which provokes first anarchy (the Irish make a spirited assault on Albion), then universal death to the human race. Lionel is left, a Robinson Crusoe of the future, the sole survivor of the ‘merciless sickle’.
Conceptually The Last Man is, like Frankenstein, strikingly original. And, clearly enough, it allegorises Mary’s late-life loneliness. But, as a story, it is sawdust – and unimaginative. Nautical transport two centuries hence is still by sail and wars are fought with the sword. Nor, it would seem, has medicine made great progress.
A stronger case can be mounted for Mathilda. The dying heroine narrates her father’s incestuous advances on her and her love for the young poet, Woodville.
The blunt fact is that nothing Shelley wrote after Frankenstein is anywhere as good. Why? The male chauvinist reply is that her husband helped her out. Without Percy she was only half a writer. But so, most likely, would he have been without her. A more likely explanation of her falling off somewhat is that her later life was too much for her. Too much for anyone.
* Gaining sexual pleasure through inflicting pain on oneself masochistically or others sadistically.
Where did Mary Godwin’s ‘hideous idea’ come from?
What Henry James called a novel’s ‘germs’ (ideas from inside the author), or données
